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Electoral Map -- 12 days to go

Here's my latest electoral map (cartogram). With only twelve days until the election, patterns now established are going to be harder to break.***

West Virginia, New Hampshire and Nevada moved noticeably in McCain's direction, but Indiana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Ohio, Montana, Minnesota and Maine moved visibly in Obama's.

McCain is allocating his resources pretty much where I would in his position (basically going for broke in Pennsylvania) but I don't know whether it can help at this point. It looks like Obama has an 11-point lead in Pennsylvania.

If you add up the states where Obama has at least a 10-point lead, you get 255 electoral votes. (A similar count for McCain would yield 134.) I think it's unlikely that any of those 20 states are going to move for McCain. This would mean that Obama needs to win only 15 of the 149 electoral votes in the states that are still competitive.

As I've now said several times, though, anything is possible. Thomas E. Dewey was substantially ahead just before he lost in 1948 (although the polling methods back then were much less accurate), and Al Gore won a lot more votes than any of the polls suggested he would in 2000 (although that was probably last-minute decisions by a lot of Nader voters).

So.... based on your electoral analysis, if Obama wins all of the states he's way ahead in, plus Ohio or Florida (in which he holds a statistically significant lead) or, say, Virginia and New Hampshire... that's it?

After winning the "easier" ones, the 15 EV could come from several different sources. Simplest would be one big state like OH or FL, yes. But there are a lot of two- and three-state combinations, where the race is tied or where Obama is slightly ahead, that would yield the same result.

To prevent this from happening, McCain needs to win all of the states from MO to ND, and then some combination that gives him 51 more EV. There are a number of combinations that would do this, but the combination from the group in which he's doing best would be FL-VA-OH-CO. Problem is, that's four different states. If he's actually successful in PA, then he could win it without OH or CO. This seems to be his strategy -- he's pulled resources out of CO and is putting them into PA. I think it's a long-shot, but it's the sort of go-for-broke move that I'd expect from him.

Personally I'm not sure I believe it about ND, but the Research 2000 poll that ended 10/15 showed it at a tie, and the Fargo Forum poll from a week earlier actually showed Obama ahead by two points. On the other hand, for about a week we thought that West Virginia was competetive due to a few polls during the period october 6-15, and that turned out to be an illusion.

Yeah, this is the wrong year to run as a Republican. And, as is typically the case in such years (e.g. 1932, 1974) it's not really fair.

Interesting, very interesting. And amusing, as much of the...erm...spiritual community roots for Obama. I've seen him described as being the one who finally carries the energies of Washington, ready to bring the USA a giant leap forwards, and the one who's chosen to lead (by God, presumably), who just cannot fail. We'll see. And it was rather long ago that I first saw those reports. Change can be daunting, though - but do we have a choice? This isn't just your election (unfortunately), it will affect the whole world, and I do hope we'll see change. We will see change, no doubt about it, but I hope we get the chance to consciously choose change, and not have it pushed onto us. Like the current economic upheavals.

Ah, well. It would be nice if there were annointed leaders like that. I think that Obama has the advantage of being highly inspirational, which is something we'll need to get through this mess. But I think they'd both be competent.

The one thing I really hope for in an Obama win would be that the rest of the world might begin to see us differently. We've done so many awful things in the last decade that I'm afraid for us. Perhaps Obama could convince some part of the world that we should get a second chance, even if we don't deserve it.

I'm very happy to have stumbled upon a story idea. It's kind of creepy, but it's just up my alley.

I just talked to my husband this morning. He said he heard (the news) the Asian markets were collapsing. Sony in trouble? Gah...just that kind of economic news. We've lost so much in our portfolio...I don't know. I now it's just on paper, but is sure hurts. Something wrong when you hear Alan Greenspan acknowledge he made a mistake.

I can't see McCain making anymore headway. And Obama needs all the help he can get once he's elected. What a mess!